Just for fun |
FREE Citation Management Software |
- RefWorks site (Login) can help you manage your footnotes & bibliography on the web. Easy to use, interfaces directly with MS Word to create footnotes & bibliographies
- Key points:
- Don’t forget to install Write-n-Cite on your PC. It’s in the Tools menu
- Also don’t forget to move items out of the “Last Imported” folder into the folder you create for your course
- Lastly, don’t forget to use “Edit citation” in the Write-n-cite application to get page numbers!
- For off campus use, get the York group code here.
- FAQ and Instructions for various databases
- RefWorks Tutorial
- Plan B: various style guides & Landmarks Citation Machine
Logging in from Home |
- Need to use Passport York or bar code number & PIN from library card to authenticate as a York user
- Information here on logging in
- Remember: Use the library web page or this blog post for the link as it will prompt for login
Background Information |
- For bibliographies: various style guides & Landmarks Citation Machine
- Academic Integrity and Plagiarism site and quiz.
- Encyclopedia Britannica — best general resource
- Oxford Reference Online — lots of online dictionaries in science & other fields
Scholarly Communications |
- Science is a journal culture
- journals are usually the only type of communications that is peer reviewed
- Peer review: research is verified by other scholars before it is published
- broad disciplinary groupings
- earth science
- space science
- life science
- medicine
- physical science
- computer science
- mathematics & statistics
- applied science / engineering
- different disciplines can have different ways of doing things
- ie. computer science is conference-based
- patents & standards are very important for engineering
- science is also becoming increasingly computationally oriented
Types of documents
- journal articles
- conference proceedings
- preprint/postprint/eprint
- monographs
- books
- patents
- standards
- technical reports
- property data
- data collections
- computer code
- now — wikis, blogs, twitter, social networks
Economics of scholarly publishing
- cost of journals is very high
- but journals are tied into rewards system in science
- openness is becoming increasingly valued
- but still hard to change
- open access — various business models for science
- open data, open notebook, open source
Finding Books |
My topics: alternative energy sources — biofuels: are they worth it
- pick a topic that interests you
- narrow your topic
- get a angle/perspective
- have a plan B (science & religion: teaching creationism in schools)
Do a search in The York Catalogue:
- by title: The citizen-powered energy handbook : community solutions to a global crisis
- by author: pahl greg
- by journal title: Scientific American
- by subject: Renewable energy sources
- by subject: biomass energy
- by keyword:
- biofuel*
- biodiesel
- biofuel and economics
- biofuel and (efficiency or viability)
- biofuel and efficiency and carbon footprint
- science and religion
- science and creationism and education
- creationism and evolution and high school
- scopes trial
- Google Books Search — lets you search inside books for obscure topics
- RACER to get books we don’t have. It usually only takes a couple of days to get the book if another ON university has it.
- Books 24×7 is a very comprehensive ebooks package, good for technology topics
- Scholars Portal eBooks: great big pile of ebooks, good general resource
Finding Articles |
All the article databases are similar. Try searches like these.
- ethanol
- ethanol and production
- biofuels and efficiency
- biofuels and cost
- biodiesel and food and cost
- (biodiesel or biofuel*) and cost and corn
- ethanol and cost and corn
A list of the best databases for general science topics
- Scholar’s Portal Journals: full text, good general source of articles
- Scientific American: good for commentary from scientists about controversial topics — but make sure it’s by scientists!
- Scopus — good complement to Scholars Portal — not completely full text but covers a broader range
- IEEE Xplore — full text engineering database
- JSTOR — good full text, better for finding sociological, historical or philosophical takes on scientific topics
- Remember: don’t use basic search, advanced only!
- ABI/Inform & Business Source Premier — business databases with lots of relevant information for most science & society topics
Using the Internet Wisely |
- ScienceBlogs — blog aggregation site for science
- Using Google as a scholarly research tool:
- Find a good portal site
- remember: who, why and when
- Wikipedia — solid source of links & basic info, not academic or 100% reliable Wikipedia as a starting point. Remember that for a controversial topic there can be a lot of back and forth and “conflict of interest” changes
Office: Steacie 102H
Email: jdupuis@yorku.ca
MSN IM: john_dupuis@hotmail.com
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